updated 01:06 am EDT, Thu August 28, 2014

On Wednesday, Microsoft updated its standalone version of Office for Mac, Office 2011, to version 14.4.4. The update provides the latest fixes for Office, and includes general functionality improvements in Microsoft Word, particularly with keyboard language detection. For PowerPoint, it improves handling of certain complex objects, and in Outlook the update includes new descriptions for supported account types.

Fixed is an issue that caused the keyboard language to be updated incorrectly in Word, as well as a problem that caused slides in PowerPoint which contained objects such as 3D charts to periodically display random artifacts in Presenter View mode on monitors with very high resolution, such as 4K TVs or monitors. The updated descriptions in Outlook include information on the choices you can make when users configure an Office 365 account.

To install the latest update, users must already be running at least version 14.1.0 of Office, on a Mac running at least OS X 10.5.8 or higher. The new version can be downloaded here.

Wow! I can hardly wait to skip this one too. I have shunned Microsoft's bloated morass of software for nearly 10 years. There are few times when Apple's suite of productivity apps won't do for me and then I can use Libre Office or Open Office or just not do it at all.

I use Office 2011 merely to check the quality of files exported to that format from Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. I never generate new content in Office. And I work in a Windoze corporate world.
Apple has done a really good job with how iWork exports to Office formats. It's fairly easy to cut the cord from Office for most things. High-end Excel work, well, that's another story.

For high end Excel work, you pretty much need a Windows machine. Mac Excel is actually pretty good except for one glaring flaw: it lacks multiprocessor support. It makes working with large datasets on the Mac very frustrating. Perhaps the mythical Office 2014 will finally fix this.